If
he were alive, economist and political scientist Leopold
Kohr would probably say "I told you so" about the economic
crises that plagued both the United States and Europe.

The problem, he argued, wasn't that the economy didn't grow. It was because
it grew too big. Actually, everything grew too big and bigness was the
root of the problem:

Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason
his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half century
since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not
flatter the egos of the power-hungry, be they revolutionaries or plutocrats.
In fact, Kohr's message is a direct challenge to them. "Wherever
something is wrong," he insisted, "something is too big."
[...]

Settling in the US, Kohr began to write the book that would define
his thinking. Published in 1957, The Breakdown of Nations laid out what
at the time was a radical case: that small states, small nations and
small economies are more peaceful, more prosperous and more creative
than great powers or superstates. It was a claim that was as unfashionable
as it was possible to make. This was the dawn of the space age –
a time of high confidence in the progressive, gigantist, technology-fuelled
destiny of humankind. Feted political thinkers were talking in all seriousness
of creating a world government as the next step towards uniting humanity.
Kohr was seriously at odds with the prevailing mood. He later commented,
dryly, that his critics "dismissed my ideas by referring to me
as a poet".

Kohr's claim was that society's problems were not caused by particular
forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism,
anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well
on what he called "the human scale": a scale at which people
could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once
scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors.
Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from,
would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions
have shown – because "the problem is not the thing that is
big, but bigness itself".

Paul Kingsnorth wrote this intriguing article over at The Guardian: Link